Thursday, July 21, 2011

Apple is considering making a bid for the Hulu online video service, according to a Bloomberg report.

Apple, the world's second-most valuable company, is in early talks that may lead to an offer for Hulu, said the people, who weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Hulu would give Apple a new subscription service and represent a possible challenge to Netflix Inc. (NFLX) Hulu's media- company owners, Walt Disney Co. (DIS), News Corp. (NWSA) and Comcast Corp. (CMCSA)'s NBC Universal, are offering suitors a five-year extension of program rights, including two years of exclusive access, people familiar with the matter said earlier this week.

Bloomberg says Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners, the bankers for Hulu, have elicited interest from Google, Yahoo, AT&T and others; however, Microsoft has dropped out of the bidding. Business Insider reports that Yahoo is willing to pay up to $2 billion with but wants four or five years of exclusive access.

Hulu was apparently put up for sale last month after receiving interest from a potential suitor.

Early benchmarks for the new Mac Mini reveals that the device performs significantly better than previous generations, reports Macminicolo.net.

These new Mac minis are absolute screamers. We ran the popular Geekbench on the last three generations of Mac mini. We ran it on both the base version, and the Server version. For fun,we also added in the highest speed G4 that was offered.

iFixIt has performed their teardown of the new MacBook Air which reveals that Apple is still using a SSD that is not soldered to the logic.

Just like in the mid-2010 MacBook Air, the SSD is not soldered to the logic board. Thankfully this means you can upgrade the SSD for more storage, but you're still out of luck if you need extra RAM.

Seeing as how the RAM is not user-serviceable, it might be worth it to buy the nicer model from the get-go (all models except the base 11" come with 4GB).

MacBook Air 13" Mid 2011 Repairability: 4 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair).● Once you manage to take off the bottom cover, all the parts are pretty easily replaceable.● Opening the bottom cover is quite difficult if you don't have the right screwdriver. It's clear that Apple didn't want people to open their machine.● All the components -- including RAM and SSD -- are proprietary, meaning that no off-the-shelf parts will work in it without serious rigging.

Apple today announced that in just one day, over one million users bought and downloaded Mac OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world's most advanced operating system. Available through the Mac App Store for $29.99 (US), users are buying Lion faster than any other OS release in Apple's history.

"Lion is off to a great start, user reviews and industry reaction have been fantastic," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Lion is a huge step forward, it's not only packed with innovative features but it's incredibly easy for users to update their Macs to the best OS we've ever made."

Lion introduces more than 250 new features to the Mac, including Multi-Touch gestures; system-wide support for full screen apps; Mission Control, an innovative view of everything running on your Mac; the Mac App Store, the best place to find and explore great software; Launchpad, a new home for all your apps; and a completely redesigned Mail app.

Adobe has posted a support document outlining known issues with their products on Mac OS X Lion. If you use Adobe products heavily you may want to read through documents before upgrading to Lion.

Some of the main issues they highlight are:● Apple has made the user Library folder hidden. Preferences, presets, and other user customization settings are stored within this Library folder.● Java Runtime needs to be installed manually, otherwise applications may behave inconsistently● Scrolling behavior opposite of expected● Rosetta support no longer included with Lion. CS2 or earlier versions of Adobe products required Rosetta● Lion has some exciting new features such as Autosave, Restore, Versioning, Full Screen Mode, and more multi-touch gestures. Since many of these features require new code in order to work properly, Adobe will investigate which ones make sense to our customers for inclusion in future versions of our products.● Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration.

It's unclear why Adobe didn't address these issues during the months that Mac OS X Lion was available as a developer preview.

Apple maintains its first position with global tablet shipments of 15 million iPads although its market share dropped to 61% from 94% a year ago, according to Strategy Analytics.

Peter King, Director at Strategy Analytics, said, "Global tablet shipments reached 15.1 million units in Q2 2011, surging 331 percent from 3.5 million in Q2 2010. Consumer and business demand for touchscreen computers remains high. Apple shipped a record 9.3 million iPads and registered a healthy 61 percent global tablet market share during the second quarter of 2011. However, Apple has drifted down from 94 percent share in Q2 2010 due to a rising number of competing software platforms."

Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, "Android captured 30 percent share of global tablet shipments in Q2 2011. Multiple Android models distributed across multiple countries by multiple brands such as Samsung, Acer, Asus, Motorola and others are driving volumes. However, no Android vendor yet offers a blockbuster model to rival the iPad, and demand for many Android vendors' products remains patchy. If Amazon decides to enter the Android tablet category later this year, that will bring fresh excitement and buzz to the Android community, but Amazon will need to deliver a truly standout offering if it really wants to make headway against the popular iPad."

The full report, Global Tablet OS Market Share: Q2 2011, is published by the Strategy Analytics Tablet & Touchscreen (TTS) service and can be obtained at the link below...

Apple has leased office space that can hold about 1,300 workers while it works towards building its new spaceship campus, according to MercuryNews.

Apple has struck a deal to lease a big office campus in Cupertino just west of De Anza College, in a move that would enable the tech titan to occupy the complex with more than 1,000 workers.

The lease deal in the old Measurex campus, now known as Results Way Corporate Center, allows Apple to rent 373,000 square feet. City officials and industry experts with direct knowledge of the transaction confirmed the rental deal.

Up to 1,300 people could work at the campus which consists of nine buildings. It's expected that some renovation work will take place before Apple moves in.

Recently, Apple unveiled plans to build a new spaceship shaped building that would hold 12,000 employees. Steve Job's told Cupertino city council that "we're renting buildings, not very good buildings either, at an ever greater radius from our campus, and we're putting people in those. And it's clear that we need to build a new campus. So we're just out of space and that doesn't mean we don't need the one we got. We do need it but we need another one to augment it."

The city of Cupertino says 'There is no chance that we're saying no' to Apple's new mothership campus.

Chpwn has announced the release of Maximizer, a new tweak for Mac OS X Lion that adds fullscreen support to every app.

Maximizer is Lion's full-screen apps, but for every app. It adds support for Lion's full-screen to apps like Chrome and Firefox (which haven't yet been updated to support it) as well as ones like TextMate, which might never gain that support. It should work with any Cocoa app, but not Carbon ones.

There may still be issues with Maximizer since its in beta; however, you can find instructions on how to install the tweak at this link...

Apple already shipped 400,000-500,000 units of its new MacBook Air from its supply chain in June and the volume is expected to remain strong through August, according to a DigiTimes report.

The sources estimated that Apple's MacBook series sales will reach 13-14 million units in 2011 and may even reach 15 million units, while adding that Apple is the only vendor that has provided a full shipments forecast to the first quarter of 2012 as the IT industry is being rather conservative about the overall demand in the second half of 2011.

The new MacBook Air features up to twice the performance of the previous generation with Core i5/i7 processors, flash storage for instant-on responsiveness, a compact design, Thunderbolt I/O, and a new low price of $999.

Apple spent $2.6 billion on its winning bid for Nortel's patents, according to its 10-K filing with the SEC. Now reports suggest Apple plans to buy 18,000 more patents from Interdigital, according to a Business Insider report.

It is reportedly bidding on Interdigital, a mobile tech company with ~18,000 patents (awarded or pending). Jefferies analyst Peter Misek thinks Interdigital's patent portfolio could be worth $3-$10 per iPhone, or $3 billion to $10 billion overall.

Since news of Apple and Google's interest in Interdigital kicked up, it's stock has soared and its market cap is now $3.1 billion.

Misek says that "Through litigation and licensing, Apple could cause the free Android OS to actually become a burden for OEMs, forcing them to become more conservative in their aggressive pricing plans. This is likely to slow the price cuts Android OEMs are likely to bring. So rather than a $150 Android smartphones, we could see a ~$200 device that is less likely to hurt a lower-cost iPhone."